macOS Tahoe is out of touch with Apple’s Touch Bar

Enterprise professionals using a MacBook Pro equipped with a Touch Bar may already have noticed that Apple’s latest Mac software update, macOS Tahoe, is reportedly breaking the feature. Almost four years since the last Mac with a Touch Bar was announced, is this an intimation of mortality for the once-hot feature?

What’s happening is that some Mac users on social media, Reddit, and elsewhere are complaining that macOS Tahoe disabled the Touch Bar on their Mac. This may end up being little more than a small software foible as many claimed the problem could be fixed with a restart, and many others weren’t impacted at all.

However, some users had to dig into the Terminal to killall ControlStrip to get life back in their bar. The fact that the flaw is fixable suggests the problem is the result of a small error, but it could also suggest a lack of testing. 

Say hello, wave goodbye

Apple first revealed the Touch Bar almost a decade ago in 2016, calling it a “breakthrough interface that replaces the traditional row of function keys with a brilliant, Retina-quality Multi-Touch display called the Touch Bar.”

Equipped with its own processor, the Touch Bar was a little touch screen that deployed controls depending on what you were doing — you’d get different controls in Mail than in Finder, and some apps, including third-party apps, developed useful tools to exploit it. It was way easier to scroll through the Timeline in Final Cut or iMovie, for example. You could also customize it to some extent.

After many years in which Apple tried and pretty much failed to convince people to use the Touch Bar, in 2022 it introduced its last Mac equipped with the feature, the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro. It also popped it inside the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro in 2020.

Now, if you watch Apple, you’ll know that it usually supports Macs for between five and seven years and then ships software updates for up to four years after that. That means Touch Bar support should be in the loop well into 2030, which suggests the current problems will get patched in a future macOS Tahoe point upgrade. Just sit tight and help is (probably) coming.

You never knew me

All the same, that this problem hit a feature Apple called “revolutionary” under a decade ago shows the extent to which the company is not paying attention to Touch Bar anymore. 

Why might that be? 

First, this suggests development of the feature has either stopped completely or been moved to a different cadence (perhaps Apple will dust it off and reintroduce it in a decade when it needs to pop a little PR dazzle into a future hardware release).

Secondly, it suggests that the effective market failure of the feature means Apple has diverted resources elsewhere, including testing resources. Because a flaw as widely reported as this should have showed up in testing. 

Finally, it suggests another possibility: that even Apple’s own test teams aren’t making much use of what Touch Bar provides. It’s plausible to speculate that this is because many of the features the Touch Bar supports are now provided by Tahoe’s somewhat smarter Siri, Shortcuts, and Apple Intelligence. In this case, it hints that testers were looking far more closely at those new features than legacy tools they weren’t so interested in, including the Touch Bar.

This grim scenario may generate a little resentment among the small cohort of MacBook Pro owners who acquired that product specifically for the Touch Bar, but I don’t think that will have been the main motivation for many of them. All the same, when you drop thousands of dollars on a Mac you should be able to expect everything to work for a good long time, particularly a feature Apple evangelized so heavily when selling the product to you.

The one definite signal this particular problem sends is that Apple’s Touch Bar has been deprecated. I imagine it would already be discontinued were it not part of the hardware, and someone in a budget-handling position in Cupertino probably wishes Apple could cease all support for it; but can’t without denting its hard-won reputation for building products that work for years. 

Can there be a future for the Touch Bar? Perhaps. I’d quite like it to be reintroduced as an app for iPhones and iPads that Mac users could deploy as an additional control interface for complex tasks in creative apps, for example. But is it actually worth the effort that would require? I’ll ask Siri that question once it gets smart enough to maybe answer it sometime next year.

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